CLOSED-LOOP REPORTING

MODASSIC MARKETING

Table

of Co

ntents

Are Your Efforts Paying Off? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 04

How Closed-Loop Marketing Works - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 06

What You Need to Set Up Closed-Loop Marketing - - - - - - - - - - - - - 10

Become a Better Marketer by Closing the Loop - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 12

Conclusion - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 14

THANKS!At MODassic, we believe marketing is an investment, not an expense. Therefore we’re big believers in the idea of Closed-Loop Reporting.

Without it, you’re just guessing, and with it, you can not only justify your marketing efforts and ROI, but make adjustments that greatly impact your bottom line. Let us know how we can help you close the loop!

RYAN SHORT // Founder of MODassic

4modassicmarketing.com

CLOSED-LOOP REPORTING

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Almost a century after John Wanamaker spoke those words, most online marketers can still feel his pain.

The irony is, today, marketers have the technology they need to “close the loop” between marketing and revenue, but few are actually taking advantage of it. To many, setting up closed-loop reporting has remained too hard and confusing to implement.

Effective marketers, however, should be able to tie every single lead, customer and dollar back to the marketing initiative that created them.

It’s time that we changed the status quo. Marketers invest a lot of time in their campaigns and are not always sure whether their efforts are paying off. Social media is the classic case: businesses engage in social media conversations without knowing how these interactions can transform into new sales.

Are Your Efforts Paying Off?

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CLOSED-LOOP REPORTING

If you are unsure on where you should start to implement successfulclosed-loop marketing, this is the place to start.

We will start by walking you through how closed-loop marketing works, demonstrating the value which comes with closed-loop marketing data. Then, we’ll talk about some of the benefits of closing the loop.

Lastly, we will show you how it can help you become a better marketer.

DETERMINE WHICH CHANNELS DRIVE NOT ONLY THE MOST TRAFFIC BUT WHICH MARKETING EFFORTS DRIVE THE MOST LEADS & SALES

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CLOSED-LOOP REPORTING

The easiest way to close the loop is to make your website the central hub for all your marketing. Search engines, social media, email marketing, referral links, paid search, even offline campaigns should get filtered to your website. Once someone visits your website, you can set a cookie on their device and start tracking their activity. A cookie is a small piece of data stored in a user’s browser.

This is the entry point of your closed-loop system. As the lead progresses through your marketing and sales stages, you’ll be able to attribute them back to the original source. If they came into your site through a link from a trade show, an email marketing campaign or a search term, for example, you’ll be able to trace them back to that original source.

For instance, here is what that data can look like. Below you can see a screenshot of HubSpot’s traffic by source. By looking at this data we are able to see trends and compare channels. We know which are our most valuable sources of traffic and can work on optimizing the rest.

How Closed-Loop Marketing Works

Track Visits, Leads & Sales Back to Their Original Source

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CLOSED-LOOP REPORTING

As you attract traffic and identify where traffic is coming from, you need to track the behavior of your visitors. Which pages are they viewing? What is their trajectory of actions? Such intelligence will illustrate a path that can, down the road, help you optimize for faster visitor-to-lead or evenvisitor-to-customer conversions.

This is the trickiest part of closed-loop reporting: making sure that you can connect a visitor’s session with their lead information once they convert on a form. Without this piece, you’ll have two separate databases, one with anonymous visitor history and one with lead information. As a result, you won’t be able to connect those leads back to their respective marketing source.

In order to make this work for you, either you do something very technical on the back end of your analytics platform or you start using some software that does this for you. There are a few of companies out there that mastered this and therefore there is no point reinventing the wheel.

These platforms track the behavior of annoymous visitors on your site. Then, once those visitors become contacts by filling out a form, downloading an ebook or making a purchase, they connect that user’s past behavior with the contact information, thus closing the loop so you can see all of their activity from first visit until final purchase—even if those were over a period of a couple years.

Some of our favorite platforms for doing this are Hubspot, Salesforce/Pardot and Marketo. Each have their own pros/cons and we’re happy to chat with you about which would be the best fit for your business.

Track the Behavior of Your Visitors

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CLOSED-LOOP REPORTING

More than just knowing where your visitors are coming from, you need to know who they are. In order to monetize the traffic you are getting and send qualified prospects to your sales team, you need to convert visitors into leads. You can make this happen by sending incoming traffic to landing pages that make an information exchange possible and collect more insights from your visitors. This is essential to closing the loop and being able to associate closed customers back to their entry source.

Direct your website visitors to a landing page with a submission form (also known as a lead capture form). Once visitors fill out this from, you’ll have whatever contact information you asked them for: name, email, phone number, etc. As a best practice, you should be funneling your traffic landing pages and forms so that you can grow your sales pipeline.

A lot of companies have a contact form as their only lead capture form. However, it’s important to remember that more than 80% of your traffic isn’t ready to fill out a contact form, so you should create content offers that are approproate for visitors higher up in the sales funnel. Users may want to download some information, but might not be ready to fill out a quote form or be contacted by a sales rep.

When capturing leads, you want to find the balance between collecting all the information you may need from a visitor, and not asking for so much that people abandon your form before they submit. At MODassic, we’re big believers in persona-based marketing, so if you can’t automatically tell what persona the visitor is based on the form they are filling out, ask a question like, “Which best describes you?” and then put a couple options that would assign a persona to the user. By making sure all contacts are assigned a persona, you can then segment your marketing efforts and send more relevant information to each contact, increasing the likelihood of a conversion.

Progressive profiling is a great way to get more information each time a user fills out a different form. Think about what additional information you need to collect from your contacts to more effectively market to them. Common examples are job title, company size, biggest need/problem, etc. This allows you to build up the information you have on a contact over time, and keeps them from being asked the same thing on every form.

Convert Your Visitors Into Leads

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CLOSED-LOOP REPORTING

Now it’s time to figure out how these visits transformed into sales. Which one of your marketing channels contributed the most customers? Are there ways you can optimize the process for other sources? Closed-loop marketing enables you to identify the activities that bring in the most (and least) revenue.

You need to look at all of the leads that your sales team has closed and attribute them back to their original marketing initiative. If you’ve set up everything we’ve already talked about, this should be a relatively straightforward process. For most medium-sized business, the easiest way to achieve this is through your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

Here is a screenshot of HubSpot’s analytics providing us with insights on customer acquisition from different marketing sources, such as email marketing, social media and referrals.

Attribute Customer Acquisition to Your Marketing Efforts

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CLOSED-LOOP REPORTING

What You Need to Set UpClosed-Loop Marketing

In order to set up closed-loop marketing, you need to map marketing activities to sales. Such an integration requires connecting your marketing software to your CRM system. In other words, you tie the intelligence emerging from your marketing communication with prospective, current and former customers to the intelligence your internal team has built with these same people.

The CRM and the marketing software talk to each other through an application programming interface (API). In this ebook our examples have centered around Hubspot, however there are a number of options. Some clients use Hubpot for marketing and also use the Hubspot CRM, whereas other clients use Huspot for marketing and use Saleforce as their CRM. Some clients may use Pardot for marketing and Salesforce as their CRM, or Marketo for marketing and Salesforce as their CRM. There are a number of different integrations and combinations available.

Map Marketing Activities to Sales Activities

The purpose of a CRM system is to synchronize the activities of your sales, marketing and customer support teams. A CRM platform can support your business in a number of ways, ranging from selling and fulfillment to identifying and rewarding loyal customers. Salesforce, SugarCRM and Hubspot CRM are some the most commonly used CRM systems.

Marketing software keeps record of your marketing data and makes it actionable by optimizing campaigns, enabling lead conversions and revealing results.

What is a CRM system?

What is marketing software?

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CLOSED-LOOP REPORTING

Tying your marketing software into your CRM system allows you to connect sales and marketing in ways that you weren’t able to before.

You can utitlize custom lead scoring to determine which leads are sales ready and which leads should enter into a marketing lead nurture. With lead scoring, you can help prioritize leads for your sales team so they can reach out to the right leads at the right time. You can manually set what actions and attributes you use to score your leads. Additionally, many systems utilize machine learning and AI to analyze your data and automatically score your leads for you based on conversion rates of existing contacts.

You can handle leads in a more efficient way by sending certain leads to a lead nurturing campaign rather than a sales person. A series of targeted email messages can invite the lead to sign up for a webinar, download an ebook from your landing page, or take some other action that will further engage them with your company and move them down the funnel.

Tying your marketing software to your CRM system also allows you to set a campaign goal with a dollar sign on it. Rather than measuring your impact through traffic and leads only, you can focus on the actual customers and sales certain channels and initiatives bring to your organization. This is especially valuable if you are investing a lot of money and effort in a campaign. Trade shows are a great example of the need for setting monetary goals. They can help determine if the cost of the tradeshow was worth it.

Benefits of Integrating Your Marketing Software With Your CRM

Lead Scoring

Lead Nurturing

Monetary Goals

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CLOSED-LOOP REPORTING

Become a Better Marketerby Closing the Loop

Closed-loop marketing directs your attention to the most powerful conversion events and channels. By looking at the sources and offers that traditionally bring in new customers for your organization, you will be able to identify the behavior you need to engage in to qualify leads and push them down the sales funnel. This is much more effective than just looking at Google Analytics, which may tell you what channels brought the most visitors but not necessarily the most customers.

As we already mentioned, closed-loop marketing gives you insights on your most powerful inbound marketing offers and enables you to set realistic goals for both marketing and sales. These two factors are key in optimizing your marketing spend to keep your cost per lead low.

Focus on the Right Channels and Offers

Keep Your Cost Per Lead Low

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CLOSED-LOOP REPORTING

By learning more about your leads and targeting them with smarter communication, you decrease the amount of time that it takes them to convert into customers. If a prospect with specific characteristics (e.g., a B2B company, with 100 employees, located in Northern America) follows a certain trajectory of actions to turn into a customer, then you can take that path and apply it to a larger segment of that demographic profile.

By gaining a 360-degree view of your sales cycle—looking at a user’s first visit to your website, browsing through their activities and identifying their last conversion event—you collect insights about the ideal prospect. This information can help you build a target persona.

Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on real data about customer demographics and online behavior, along with educated speculation about their personal histories, motivations and concerns.

Analyzing the path that prospects take on the journey to becoming a customer is a great way to get insights about the needs and challenges of your target audience. If you use marketing software, you can see which search terms brought prospects to your site, how long they stayed on your site, which pieces of content they viewed, and which forms they’ve filled out. Such lead intelligence will help you make better decisions when identifying the characteristics of your ideal customers and developing ways to nurture your new prospects.

Shorten Your Sales Cycle

Gain Insights About Your Target Audience

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CLOSED-LOOP REPORTING

Closed-loop reporting is one of the more sophisticated steps of successful inbound marketing. Getting it right is an eye-opening experience that reveals both strengths and weaknesses, and cuts through the widespread vagueness of marketing myths and assumptions.

By now, you should have the foundation to close the loop. If you have questions or are interested in seeing how working with an agency can help you integrate your sales and marketing to gain more insight and create an ROI driven marketing strategy, give MODassic a call at 214-295-5165 or visit us at modassicmarketing.com.

Conclusion

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